Actor/comedian Seth Rogen reckons that the Preacher TV series that he’s helping to adapt for AMC is going to be “a massive tapestry of f***ing weirdos”. Telling Crave Online that he and the other writers have no intention of merely retelling the story slavishly on screen, he reveals that the show will combine characters, omit characters and draw on the comic’s spin-offs for inspiration.

Describing a literal page-to-page adaptation as “like the most boring creative endeavour one could go on!” he reveals, “We are changing the specifics of how the narrative is unfolding. A lot of the building blocks we’re not changing – a lot of characters we’re keeping – but we want to make a show that if you’re a fan of the comic, you don’t know what to expect.”

And he doesn’t think the comic’s creator, Garth Ennis, is going to have issues with that approach. “I mean there’s some things that even Garth will argue… is quick to admit that we probably should not even attempt to put on television. There’s some characters, we’re talking about maybe we combine these two into one person.”

As for the spin-offs, Rogen says he’s read them all and that he and the show’s other writers intend to fit them in “in some capacity… to us the tangential element is one of our favourite things. The fact that it does go off into these other worlds and explore these other characters, I mean that’s something that we wholeheartedly intend on indulging in because it’s one of the best parts about the comic. Just the massive tapestry of f***ing weirdos. [Laughs.]”

Preacher will star Dominic Cooper as small-town preacher Jesse Custer, who becomes fused with a powerful entity named Genesis, giving him the ability to order people to do whatever he commands. Ruth Negga plays his gun-toting ex Tulip O’Hare, Joe Gilgun plays Irish vampire Cassidy and W Earl Brown plays Sheriff Hugo Root. It’s due to debut on AMC in 2o16.